Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Rwanda’s donor aid cuts

Doesn’t a country that lost a million people deserve to protect its people against the threat of another genocide?

In a space
of one week in July, the Netherlands, Germany, UK and USA announced
they would cut their aid to Rwanda over its alleged involvement in the
ongoing rebellion in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are
another pointer to the dangers of Western aid to poor countries. The use
of aid as an instrument of blackmail is a common practice by Western
Europe and its offshoots in North America, Australia and New Zeeland. In
almost all official and unofficial relations with recipients, Western
donors keep rubbing in the fact that those recipients should behave
themselves lest… This “lest” includes a series of threats such as
cutting aid, sending a leader to the International Criminal Court (ICC)
or imposing sanctions.

A
Western NGO may launch a campaign against a poor country for behaving
in a manner inconsistent with its (the NGO’s) desires. This NGO will
immediately receive support from the Western journalists and their news
organisations as the platforms for this campaign. Then a Western
academic who is an “expert” on the poor country will appear in the media
and publish a paper supporting the claims of the first two. These will
win over a section of the local African elite with an axe to grind
against their government to legitimise their claims. This concerted
action will “force” the governments in the West to act with the
blackmail of cutting aid or even worse.

I put
“forced” in inverted commas because often, Western NGOs, journalists and
academics have a common agenda with their governments based on a
shared attitude, values, interests and norms. The result is that
threats of aid cuts force governments of poor countries to respond by
working to please aid givers rather than their own citizens. Thus,
although Western governments, journalists, academics and activists are
the leading self-appointed vanguards in the cause of democracy in our
countries, the effect of their actions is to undermine democracy. Aid
is the vehicle through which the interests of the donors are placed
above the interests of citizens.

I used to
think that anyone who gives you money would tend to act in such a
manner. Yet Western countries are not the only ones that give aid. China
and Japan do. But hardly does anyone hear them issue threats. This
cannot be because they are undemocratic. Japan is as democratic as it
gets. Besides, the worst dictatorships in Africa – wakina Mobutu Sese
Seko, Samuel Doe, Siad Barre, etc have historically been propped by the
West whenever it served their interests. Thus Asian restraint from
interfering in the domestic politics of the recipients of their aid
seems to be born of a deep seated and genuine respect for the
sovereignty of poor countries.

Western
aid comes with too many lectures and sermons on how our leaders should
manage our affairs – always by adopting the policies, practices and
institutions of the donor country. It is difficult to develop or
emancipate one’s people when the actions taken are aimed at pleasing
international masters rather than domestic constituencies. It is through
aid and these emergent international institutions like the ICC that
the West seems to be seeking to regain what it lost through
decolonisation.

In the
week the donors cut aid to Rwanda, a low level official in the State
Department had the audacity to threaten President Paul Kagame with
indictment before the ICC – an institution his own country has refused
to subject itself to. All this is based on allegations in an addendum to
a UN report. Never mind that the authors of the report did not even
bother to ask Rwanda government officials to respond to accusations made
against them individually and collectively. The authors say their
sources are DRC officials and civilians. Western nations say they have
deeply entrenched principles of fairness and natural justice. Was the
disregard of such principles a mere oversight?

But let us
assume, just for argument’s sake, that Rwanda is actively involved in
arming M23 and supporting its operations. In 1994, it lost one million
people in a space of 100 days and an entire country was devastated. The
perpetrators of this evil are right across the border from Rwanda in
eastern DRC – fully armed and sometimes supplied by Kinshasa. In eastern
DRC live Tutsis with a shared existential threat as many in the
leadership of Rwanda. Yet Rwanda is expected to do nothing about it. The
country that is hosting these criminals is not being asked to account
for its complicity in this problem. The UN has 17,000 troops in DRC who
have never arrested even one killer. Instead it is asking the victims
of genocide to sit back and wait until they are exterminated – exactly
what it asked them to do in 1994.

Let us
assume that it is the principle of international relations that a
country should not get involved in another directly by having troops
there or indirectly by supporting a local militia whose interests
converge with its own. Therefore, Rwanda is only being asked to respect
this established practice that all other nations adhere to. If Rwanda
adopted this do-nothing-policy and the criminals invaded, who would be
held accountable? The UN which failed it in 1994, Human Rights Watch and
its leader Kenneth Roth who seems to care more about Africans in Congo
than the millions of African-Americans rotting in jails in America, or
is it the Americans, British, Germans and Dutch who by cutting aid are
forcing the Rwanda government into inaction?

On
September 9, 2011, the United States lost 3,000 people, four planes, two
prominent buildings and a quarter of another. In response, it
mobilised its NATO allies and they have for the last eleven years
occupied Afghanistan – a country that is 20,000km from America. Among
these NATO members are the Dutch, UK and Germany. They bomb, they kill
and they rule there. Note: there was not a single Afghan citizen
involved in 9/11; they were all Saudis and Egyptians. The only thing
Afghanistan did was to harbour the perpetrators. Doesn’t Rwanda that
lost a million people and an entire country deserve to also get
involved in DRC – right across its border – where there is no state to
protect its people against the threat of another genocide?